Welcome to the breakdown to breakthrough podcast.
My name is Lisa A Romano.
I am a life coach,
Best-selling author,
YouTube vlogger,
Meditation teacher,
And expert in the field of codependency and narcissistic abuse.
I am a believer in the power of an organized mind.
My aim is to help people learn what it means to live above the veil of consciousness rather than living a reactive life.
May your heart feel blessed,
Your mind feel expanded,
And your spirit find hope as you spend time with me here at the breakdown to breakthrough podcast.
Codependency is all about the other person,
Right?
We've meshed with the other person.
So we think that this idea of relationship trust has to do with me being able to trust this other person.
Not really.
What we have to do is we have to understand that our ability to trust another person is always going to be a mirror to how well we can trust the self.
Let me explain.
The more I trust myself and trust what?
Trust my beliefs,
Trust my instincts,
Trust how I feel,
Trust my feelings,
Trust that I am a worthy human being.
The more I'm able to trust that I will pay attention to a red flag when it surfaces,
The more that I'm able to be intimate with myself,
The more honest I am with myself about who I am,
The more honest I'll be able to be in a relationship.
So when I'm in a relationship with someone and I'm worrying about this person hurting me,
I first have to also understand that it's possible that someone is going to let me down.
We have to get over this idea that just because we trust someone means they're never going to hurt us.
People are human.
They make mistakes.
The goal is not to trust someone blindly.
The goal is to know that I can be in a relationship with someone that I trusted in the beginning of the relationship.
I am not going to dissolve into a rabbit hole if and when this person turns out to be untrustworthy.
When codependents discover that their spouse has cheated on them or that their best friend has stabbed them in the back,
A codependent person that struggles with a sense of self will take that on and internalize these emotions like,
Oh my God,
It's my fault,
Or will feel rejected because this thing happened because we don't have a healthy sense of self.
The healthier that I became and the more I became aware that I was a valid person and that I had a right to be treated well and that I was worthy.
I wasn't this sinner.
I wasn't this stained human being.
I was good.
I was created in the image and the likeness of God,
Which was good.
Sure,
I had some ego stuff and human stuff that I had to navigate,
But born,
I was born perfect.
This other stuff happened to me.
I was going to have to work that out on my soul's journey.
The more I understood that I had intrinsic value,
Then the more I was able to understand that if I love someone and this person cheated on me,
Then that had to do with that person,
Not me,
Because I'm going to show up 100% and I'm going to give you the best of me.
I'm not going to hold back anymore because I want to feel seen in a relationship.
I want to feel heard in a relationship.
I want this other person to feel seen and feel heard.
I want to nurture as much as I need to be nurtured.
The more I developed a healthy sense of self,
The less I was concerned about this other person screwing up.
I think that when you ask the question,
How to love and trust again,
It really has to do with our ability to love and trust that we are innate.
We have innate value.
When I know that I have innate value,
I know that regardless of what I look like and what I weigh and whatever else is going on in my life,
My equal partner exists.
It doesn't matter if I'm 300 pounds or 1,
000 pounds,
150 pounds,
Or whatever.
It doesn't matter.
What matters is I,
As a human being,
Have innate value.
I,
Regardless of what is happening outside of me,
Deserve to be respected.
Anybody who wants to show up and be a part of my life,
Regardless of what I look like,
Regardless of my past,
Has to show me respect because I now respect myself.
If this person doesn't respect me,
I'm going to love myself enough to stop this relationship.
I hope what you're hearing me say is that you learn to love and trust again by learning to love and trust that you are worthy as a human being.
You work on valuing this idea that,
Wow,
I am enough.
We all need a time to heal and grieve any relationship that we've been in.
You have to identify,
Am I somebody that falls apart when someone abuses me or when someone turns out to be untrustworthy?
Because that's an issue.
That's a red flag of codependency.
Am I somebody who,
On the other hand,
Knows that I am of value and knows that the true commandment of God is to love others as you love yourself?
You must love yourself.
I always tell my kids,
You have to love yourself more than you love anyone else because the minute that you love someone else more than you love yourself,
You lose perspective.
You lose the ability to be objective.
You have now put another God before you.
When you truly love yourself,
You're kind to yourself,
You have empathy for yourself,
You have compassion for yourself,
And you will mirror that ability of love and love that way to someone else.
In other words,
You don't have anything to worry about.
It's not a narcissistic sense,
Malignant self-love where I loved the exclusion of others.
No,
No,
No,
No.
I'm able to have compassion and understanding and empathy for me and my inner child.
I know that on an innate level,
I am worthy because I am.
I know that energetically and vibrationally,
I am tapped into the field of energy around me.
I am part of the matrix.
There is no such thing as separation.
I know that I am as worthy as a butterfly or as a tree or as any human being.
I really had to think about that because I find it so interesting how so many of us love celebrities.
We follow celebrities all over the world.
Really,
We just become their groupies.
I thought to myself,
Is Madonna or Oprah or Beyonce or Jay-Z or Taylor Swift,
Whoever?
Are any of these people innately better than me?
No.
Are any of these people innately better than you?
Absolutely not.
They all got here the same way you did,
And they're all going to leave the same way you leave.
They're all on the same path.
They all have an ego,
An id,
An ego,
And a super ego.
They all have issues that they have to deal with.
They are not any better than you or have any more value than you.
When people say to me,
How do I love myself?
You have to start recognizing that you,
On an innate level,
Have value.
You have to understand that this idea that you don't love yourself,
This negative programming came from the outside,
Came from the environment in which you lived in.
That's not your fault.
That is not your fault.
When I was creating my 12-week Breakthrough Coaching Program,
And I was trying to figure out how do I make the pathway that I created or the blueprint that I created,
The steps that I took to heal myself from codependency,
How do I help people understand what those steps were?
One of the things that I realized was that a lot of people don't understand that you dislike yourself because you never felt loved.
You never felt innately loved.
I realized that a lot of people didn't understand that this negative self-talk was a product of the outside world,
Which is not you.
It was done to you.
Loving yourself means that you have to become aware enough to recognize that you berate yourself all day.
You berate yourself all day because as a child,
You felt rejected and abandoned.
That's not your fault.
Becoming cognizant and becoming aware that,
Wow,
I have this negative crap rolling around my head,
And it's not even mine.
Imagine if you could go to sleep,
Listen to a meditation,
Just imagine,
And have that program just pulled out of your brain.
Imagine if we can reprogram you with a new microchip that was loving.
Imagine if the voices that you hear are that of a divine female energy of compassion,
Of agape-type love.
Imagine if you could feel divine male energy making you feel protected,
Making you feel seen and valued.
Imagine if we could just pull all of these negative tapes out of your head,
And we could reprogram you with this loving,
Nurturing,
Vibrational energy and these new messages.
Your life would take on a different paradigm.
Your external experiences would change.
What you would hear all day is,
You are worthy,
And you are enough.
It's okay that you made a mistake.
The messages that you'd hear would be of self-compassion.
How you love yourself is that you have to figure out and understand that you have the ability to observe the negative programming.
How I figured this out was that when I was trying to write out my program,
My 12-week program,
I had to come up with a way to help people understand that this is just programming.
What I did was I did a side-by-side analysis.
I asked myself,
Well,
If family systems are like cells in a Petri dish,
And child A was put into a healthy,
Nurturing environment,
No alcoholism,
No narcissism,
No abuse,
No marginalizing,
No rejection,
If child A was put into that environment,
Felt protected,
And the home life was predictable,
This child would be programmed for positive self-talk.
Think child B,
Sexual abuse,
Incest survivor,
Physical abuse,
Domestic violence,
Has witnessed domestic violence,
Alcoholism,
Addiction,
Schizophrenia,
Codependency amongst the parents.
Think about the programming of the child in the Petri dish or the environment B.
Think about the program that's in their head.
Think about the narrative of the inner critic.
It's berating.
It's full of shame.
It's full of I am not enough,
What's wrong with you?
Child B does not love the self.
Doesn't mean that child B is not worthy of love or is not love.
It just means that what happened to the child is corrupt.
What happened to the child is unloving,
And that's not the child's fault.
Child A goes out into the universe and becomes an adult who loves himself.
Even if they get married and their wife cheats on them,
They understand,
Uh-oh,
Boundary's been violated.
I don't deserve this.
It's you that is the issue,
Not me.
It's a beautiful thing.
We have to understand that those of us who struggle with codependency,
Those of us who have been neglected in childhood,
We must understand that when people hurt us,
We internalize that hurt and we feel responsible for it,
Or we think that because they cheated on us or because they lied to us,
There's something dysfunctional about us that created this situation.
There's this sense of over-responsibility,
And that is just not true.
And so learning to love yourself and learning to trust yourself and even love and trust other people means that you have to blow a hole in your level of consciousness about yourself.
Your perception of self must be expanded.
You have to raise your consciousness around,
Wait a minute,
I'm one of those people that do that.
If people treat me rudely,
I internalize it.
I feel like it's my fault.
If my sister doesn't want to talk to me,
I feel like it's my fault.
It's not your fault.
So it's important to learn to disidentify and to even label how people are treating you,
And to not take on when someone has gone out of the way to hurt you,
Don't take it on.
Look at it as their behavior,
And that will help you.
And so learning to love and trust someone again is always going to come back to us,
Learning to love us and learning to be intimate with ourselves.
Let me just run through the things that I wrote.
So we all need time to heal and grieve a dysfunctional relationship.
We have to forgive ourselves.
We can't blame ourselves.
Why someone lied or cheated.
We have to trace back and see if feelings of childhood abandonment might be recreating the relationship dynamics we are in.
Because if I was abandoned in childhood and I'm afraid of intimacy,
Then I'm going to create these cat and mouse type relationships,
Where it's about a person who pursues and a person who avoids.
So it's very important that we trace this back to abandonment in childhood.
Make sure that you're happy without a relationship before trying to go full on into a new relationship.
Identify what type of relationship you're in.
So if you enter into this relationship and you know it's not going to go anywhere,
Be honest about that.
If this is a relationship that you're not going to invest in,
Be honest about that with yourself and with this other person.
Because if you can be honest with yourself,
Then you're going to save yourself a whole lot of trouble.
Because this other person is going to know right away whether or not they want to be in a relationship with you.
Ultimately,
You need to be in a relationship with someone who is on your same page and who resonates with you.
Now this is the thing.
We're always going to attract that person.
So if I don't love myself,
I will manifest someone who doesn't love me.
If I begin to love myself and honor myself and respect myself,
Then I will resonate with someone who loves me and respects me.
So we're always emitting a vibration.
And our vibrations are basically,
In my humble opinion,
A bunch of codes.
And the matrix is a field of abundant energy that is full of these codes.
And the universe's job is to align codes with codes.
